[OS X TeX] texdoc query

[Victor Ivrii]

On 12/24/06, Rowland McDonnell <rjmm-lists1 at fireflyuk.net> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've got a MacTeX installation which works.
>
> When I use texdoc, for example:
>
> texdoc pdfpages (to view the pdfpages package documentation), I find

> that I get the relevant pdf file opening in TeXShop v2.09d.


Are you sure that this was a pdf file? Documentation to different
packages comes in different formats: dvi, ps, pdf, html pointer. So
different applications (which are your system default applications to
handle these files) are fired to handle these files. I doubt that
normally your pdf files are opened by TeXShop even if one can
configure system this way.

If package foo.sty had documentation as foousermanual.dvi it is opened
by TeXShop which displays it as pdf. The trouble is that when dvi file
is in the directory which is not user writable, the TeXShop behaves
rather differently and does not save pdf file (it just cannot). O

The best solution I found in this case is: assume that

%texdoc foo

results in TeXShop displaying foousermanual.pdf; then in terminal I type

%locate foousermanual.dvi

which returns say

/usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/doc/generic/foousermanual.,dvi

(may be few results). Then I copy this dvi file to writable directory, normally

%cp  /usr/local/teTeX/share/texmf.local/doc/generic/foousermanual.dvi ~/Desktop

open it via TeXShop and then foousermanual.pdf automatically appears
there and I can open it in AR (which I also prefer as pdf files
reader). This is a bit cumbersome but it is the best what I found.
Actually the similar discussion was on this list a while ago

HTH



-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii

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